We’re only just starting to understand the side-effects of driverless cars

This
file photo taken Tuesday, May 13, 2014 shows a row of Google
self-driving cars outside the Computer History Museum in Mountain
View, Calif.AP Photo/Eric
Risberg

The dawn of driverless cars is almost upon us. Governments around
the world are rapidly legalising the use of driverless vehicles
on their roadsand are working towards
overcoming regulatory difficulties associated with their
large-scale introduction.

Meanwhile, some of the largest technology and automotive
corporations in the world are investing heavily in driverless
technologies.

Many people in industry seem certain that the largest revolution
in personal transport since the invention of the car itself is
less than a decade away.

Whether this technology will ever mean we can give up all
responsibility for driving is unclear. But the shift towards driverless
cars won’t just mean a change in the way we drive. It will
undoubtedly have other implications for car owners, authorities
and ultimately all of us.

While the large-scale introduction of fully driverless consumer
vehicles appears to be around a decade away, the current generation of new
cars is already highlighting some of the potential challenges.
For example, in recent demonstrations funded by large car
manufacturers, security experts were able to “hack” the onboard
computers of ordinary vehicles and take control of braking,
steering and engine functions, among other things. In one
particularly alarming demonstration, a hacker was able to force
the car to perform an emergency stop at high speed.

Safe and secure?

This increasing reliance on computers in modern cars is itself a
major and well-documented safety andsecurity challenge, that will be significantly
heightened by the nature of truly autonomous vehicles. In such
cases, the fundamental fact is that all systems within the
vehicle are under the control of a piece of sophisticated
software which will always be vulnerable to malicious attack and
malfunction.

What’s more, unlike many current vehicles, this software is
likely to be directly networked to other vehicles and
systems. This in turn introduces a whole host of safety and
security complications beyond those experienced in current cars.

For example, the complexity of processing data about the road and
location and behaviours of surrounding vehicles means that small
errors in the design or operation of the software could lead to
collisions or other dangerous behaviours that could have fatal
results. And the potential to deliberately trigger such events is at the
root of the security challenge.

This issue emerges from the fact that the software in control of
driverless vehicles – much like the brains of human drivers –
have a model of the vehicle they are controlling and a model of
their environment.

The environment model means each vehicle collects huge quantities
of data about its surroundings, something that is particularly
troubling from a privacy perspective.

This data includes locations of other road users and pedestrians
relative to the vehicle. Although the anonymous to a driverless
vehicle, the potential to infer identities and other information
(particularly of other vehicles through networked capabilities)
is a privacy minefield.

Black box for the road

Yet if used responsibly, the power of this data could be used for
a number of beneficial purposes. For instance, a commonly
proposed use is for data to support police inquiries. In the event of an accident
involving or within the vicinity of the vehicle, a driverless car
could act as a black box with information of the incident
recorded in unprecedented detail, which in turn could be used to
support an investigation.

More creative uses of the technologies in driverless cars could
include the ability to supercharge “smart roads” with their
networked capabilities by eliminating traffic jams and
potentially even doing away with traffic lights and road signs altogether. They
could also be used to gather information about road conditions,
traffic or even weather or pollution.

These same networked capabilities could also enable cars to
foresee potential collisions and take steps to
avoid an accident by actively keeping track of their surroundings
including cars and hazards beyond the visual range of a human
driver. One industry report has estimated wide-scale introduction
of driverless cars could reduce accidents by up to 90%.

Despite the potential benefits, there is always the potential for
misuse. This is an ongoing challenge with powerful technologies
more generally as they become increasingly ubiquitous in our
everyday lives.

If these challenges can be resolved, however, the mainstream
introduction of these vehicles could save hundreds of thousands
of lives each year, while having countless other environmental
and economic benefits.